Magento Commerce with Fast-CGI and suExec

I have been able to sucessfully install the platform and can access the homepage and user front end just fine. However, when I try to log in to the back end I am getting a 500 internal error message. This is from the users log file:

It seems very strange to me that the main site works and the admin section doesn't. Although I feel like it might have something to do with the rewrites that the .htaccess file does. I am not very familiar with FCGI/SuEXEC yet so bear with me if I missed something obvious.

Unfortunately there is nothing else in the log that shows up when the script fails. I've read in a few places that SuExec doesn't work with php directives in the .htaccess file, so I had commented those out but it didn't help.

Yeah me either. It's kind of a bummer, but luckily I got the site working by installing a previous release. There must be a bug in one of the .htaccess files or php scripts that was causing the 500 error. Hopefully this will be resolved in future releases, though I didn't see anything about it in the community forums. Thanks for all of your help I really appreciate it. Keep it up!

The problem is basically that in 1.3.1+ there are outbound calls made to get some files for widgets in the backend. The process that got me to this conclusion was first setting these apache directives (under options tab in the website):

I was then finally able to move around the backend without any internal 500 error messages popping up, though it took 3-5min to get from page to page. I kept investigating further and came across the following thread:

Thanks for updating the thread. I get the 500 internal error on some page loads, even on front end. After I get the 500 error, the next page load works, so perhaps its more a memory issue. The entry in the log is what was cause for concern.

I'm on a test server right now, so we'll see how everything goes when working on production.

I'll bookmark this page in case it happens consistently on the backend.